PRUSA, generally distinguished by the epithet _ad Olympum_, more clearly to mark its site, is said to have been built by Hannibal (Plin. v. 2), but was, probably, much older, though Chrysostom, a native of the town, does not claim for it any high antiquity (Orat. xliii. p. 585). It continued to flourish under the Roman Empire (Plin. Epist. x. 35), and was, also, for a while, a leading place under the Greek Empire; indeed, it is still, under the modified name of Broussa, one of the chief cities of Turkish Anatolia. Its name will, doubtless, be fresh in the memory of many of our readers as the long home of the gallant Abd-el-Kader, and of more than one of the Hungarian leaders whom the treachery of Georgey compelled to abandon their native country. The grand Olympus which overhangs Broussa was generally termed the Mysian, to distinguish it from the Olympus of Thessaly. Near it was the town of Hadriani (now Edrenos), the coins of which bear the inscription ΑΔΡΙΑΝΕΩΝ ΠΡΟC ΟΛΥΜΠΙΟΝ. NICÆA, so named after his wife by Lysimachus, was the real capital of Bithynia, and, for a long time, one of the most important towns of Western Asia. Pliny the Younger, as governor of the province, undertook to restore it, and, during the later Byzantine period it was constantly taken and retaken by the Greeks and Turks, respectively. Leake and other travellers show that there are abundant remains of this famous old town, now called Isnik; not that, under the Turks, it is, or ever could have become, a great city. In Ecclesiastical story, Nicæa will ever be memorable as the site where assembled, in A.D. 325, the grand body of bishops, so well known as the _Council of Nice_, to condemn the Arian heresy. Our own Church is believed to owe to it its most valuable “Nicene” Creed. Coins of Nicæa abound even as late as the time of Gallienus. NICOMEDEIA, as the name implies, the chief residence of the Bithynian kings of the name of Nicomedes, was a large and flourishing city, and, as may be gathered from the letters of Pliny to Trajan, long continued so; indeed, in later times, when occupied with the Parthian or other Eastern wars, it was a convenient and constant residence for the Roman emperors (Niceph. Callist. vii.). We have a curious account of the ruin done to this city by an earthquake in one of the strange orations of Julian’s friend, the orator Libanius, entitled μονωδία ἐπὶ Νικομηδείᾳ, in which he mourns the loss of its public baths, temples, gymnasia, &c.: some of these were, however, subsequently restored by Justinian (Procop. Ædif. v. 1). The historian Arrian was born here, and Constantine the Great died at his villa Ancyron, hard by.